I know about the availability of the search APIs (Google, Live etc), but have never actually used any of those. Yesterday I needed some automated searching for a small app that I was writing and decided to try one of these APIs. From experience, I still fine Google to be the most accurate search engine, though Live search is now a lot better than what it used to be.
But since this was a small app, I decided I would try the API that was easiest for me to get started with. First, when I tried Google I ended up with their Search API page. Well there was a lot of documentation, but then I found it kind of confusing to find how do I get started and also how do I get started (Their SOAP search service is not avbl anymore for new developers).
The next was Live Search and I found this incredible thing that they call Interactive API. Two clicks and I have VB source code that I can copy paste into my VS and the code also has a comment with the web service URL that I can use to add a web reference. This is an incredible tool that made my day. Great job Microsoft!!
It is a little difficult to find how to create an AppID etc from this page, but the Getting Started Page has a great step by step description that should help you write your first application.
Visual Studio 2008 Users
If you are using VS 2008, then you need to change the code to get this to work. You will have to add a Service Reference with the same URL.
The following line will give you an error as the MSNSearchService Class is not available.
Dim s As New MSNSearchService()
The correct service class that gets generated is
Dim s As New MSNSearchPortTypeClient()
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